1. Field
This disclosure relates generally to the field of communications and more specifically to the system and methods for traffic volume reporting by an access terminal during connection setup with a radio access network.
2. Background
Radio access networks (RANs) are widely deployed to provide voice, data and multimedia services, to mobile devices also known as access terminals (AT). RANs typically use different radio access technologies, such as code division multiple access (CDMA) used in CDMA2000 networks, wideband CDMA technology used in a universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) and UMTS terrestrial radio access network (UTRAN), time division multiple access (TDMA) technology used in Global System for Mobile communications (GSM), and frequency division multiple access (FDMA) used in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. The primary task of any radio access technology is to efficiently allocate a limited number of available radio channels to all mobile devices connected to the network in order to avoid data traffic congestion, dropped calls or other undesirable service interruptions.
UTRAN, other wideband CDMA systems and LTE use a radio resource control (RRC) protocol to control allocation of radio channels to ATs. For 3GPP based systems, RRC protocol is described in 3GPP TS 25.331 or 36.331. For UTRAN systems, the RRC protocol, at the time of a new RRC signaling connection setup, can allocate either a dedicated radio channel (DCH) or a common radio channel (FACH), which is shared among several ATs, to the ATs connected to the network based on RNC specific implementation algorithms. In the majority of currently deployed UTRAN networks, RRC automatically assigns a dedicated radio channel (DCH) to the AT during new connection setup and then reassigns a common radio channel (FACH) if traffic volume from the AT is low or after a certain inactivity time. These channel reassignments, also known as RRC state transitions, when triggered by many ATs, waste RAN's processing load and may impact RAN's over-the-air and backhaul capacity. AT's battery is also impacted when it is allocated DCH channels for transmitting a small amount of data. LTE systems, such as enhanced UTRAN (E-UTRAN), have similar issues when RRC allocates different dedicated channels with a short or long discontinuous reception (DRX) cycle, based on the amount of data to transmit. Accordingly, there is a need to improve RRC channel allocation scheme during new connection setup in UTRAN, other wideband CDMA systems and LTE networks.